Thursday, January 22, 2009

DRM in retreat?

Ed Felten quietly applauds the retreat of drm in stored content, most specifically the music industry with Apple's apparent recent abandonment of it.

"Last week's agreement between Apple and the major record companies to eliminate DRM (copy protection) in iTunes songs marks the effective end of DRM for recorded music. The major online music stores are now all DRM-free, and CDs still lack DRM, so consumers who acquire music will now expect it without DRM. That's a sensible result, given the incompatibility and other problems caused by DRM, and it's a good sign that the record companies are ready to retreat from DRM and get on with the job of reinventing themselves for the digital world.

In the movie world, DRM for stored content may also be in trouble. On DVDs, the CSS DRM scheme has long been a dead letter, technologically speaking. The Blu-ray scheme is better, but if Blu-ray doesn't catch on, this doesn't matter...

It remains to be seen how far DRM will retreat. Will it wither away entirely, or will it hang on in some applications?

Meanwhile, it's interesting to see traditional DRM supporters back away from it. RIAA chief Mitch Bainwol now says that the RIAA is agnostic on DRM. And DRM cheerleader Bill Rosenblatt has relaunched his "DRM Watch" blog under the new title "Copyright and Technology". The new blog's first entry: iTunes going DRM-free."